3. Juli

The people of Pskov begged Archbishop Vasily Kalika to come and bless them. He did, took the plague, and died on the road home. Novgorod was struck soon after.

Richard Arkwright, a wig-maker from Preston, patented a spinning machine with rollers that drew out cotton thread strong enough for the warp. It was too big to turn by hand, so it needed a horse or a water wheel: a machine that belonged in a mill, not a cottage.

Anna Maria Mozart had spent the Paris months alone in cold lodgings while her son worked. She died after two weeks’ illness, at 57. That night Wolfgang wrote to his father only that she was very ill, and told the truth to a family friend, the Abbé Bullinger, asking him to prepare Leopold. She was…

South through the Bitterroot and Big Hole valleys to the canoes cached at Camp Fortunate, down to the Three Forks, then overland to the Yellowstone. Half the horses vanished one night, most likely to Crow horsemen; Clark went on in two dugouts lashed together.

Nez Perce guides showed Lewis the “road to the buffalo” over what is now Lewis and Clark Pass. From the falls he rode north with three men up the Marias into Blackfeet country, and found the river did not reach far enough north to push the border.

Lewis would take a short cut to the Great Falls and explore the Marias to see if Louisiana reached further north; Clark would go back to Camp Fortunate and down the Yellowstone. Travelers’ Rest is the only camp of the expedition confirmed by archaeology: its latrine still held traces of the…

Thousands of enslaved people, led by John Gottlieb, called “General Buddhoe”, gathered at Frederiksted and threatened to burn the town. Governor Peter von Scholten rode in and declared everyone free that afternoon.

After a cannonade of an hour or more, some 12,500 Confederates crossed a mile of open fields towards the Union centre on Cemetery Ridge. More than half were killed, wounded or captured. “It is all my fault,” Lee told the men coming back.

Lee’s second invasion met the Army of the Potomac at a crossroads town. The largest battle ever fought in North America: about 51,000 casualties (NPS: 23,000 Union, 28,000 Confederate) in three days. Lee never invaded the North again.

Fifteen stages round the edge of France. In January Steinès had crossed the Tourmalet on foot in snow, been found by a search party at three in the morning, and wired Desgrange: “Road passable to vehicles.” Octave Lapize won.

The 1st Machine Gun Regiment and sailors from Kronstadt marched armed on the Tauride Palace demanding “All power to the soviets”, which the Soviet refused. The Bolsheviks hesitated to lead. Loyal troops and the government’s claim that Lenin was a German agent broke the movement. About 400 people…

On a brake-test run down Stoke Bank, Nigel Gresley’s streamlined A4, with Joe Duddington driving, touched 126 miles an hour (202.8 kilometres an hour). No steam locomotive has officially gone faster.

Japan’s Fifteenth Army crossed the Chindwin to invade India and take the British base at Imphal. The garrison, supplied by air, held; the attackers starved when the monsoon came. It was the worst defeat in the Japanese army’s history to that time.

The second launch of the Soviet Moon rocket. Seconds after liftoff its engines shut down; it fell back and exploded, wrecking the launch complex in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever. Thirteen days later Apollo 11 lifted off.

A second CDC report counted 26 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer then seen mostly in older men, among young gay men in New York and California. The same day the New York Times ran its first article on the disease, headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals”.